Connected-uk.com » support

Taking time to secure our code bases

Andy — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:54:52 +0000

Often we’re asked “can’t you change it quickly whilst I’m on the phone?” or “It’s only a quick tweak, can you do it straight away?”.
To project manage, we use Basecamp and like most of the big boys in the internet/software development world (including Google Android), our development environments use a host of version control, testing and deployment systems including Git and Capistrano to name a couple. Basecamp enables collaborative management of changes and our develpoment environment enables complete version control over all our websites/applications, branched development, more secure testing and living of projects, real world test environments and complete backup of the our code bases.
It does however mean that ‘quick tweaks’ take just a few minutes longer to be completed – small price to pay for a fully tested application that just works? An added bonus of this slight ‘delay’ means some of our partners think twice about why they are changing things, if it’s really required and if so, how it can be better organised.
We had an occurrence last year where one of our web server had a hardware failure, the quickest solution was to reinstall on a completely new server. Our partners, Rackspace, very quickly configured the new server and after a bit of configuring, we were able to ‘deploy’ four websites, a host of web applications and micro-applications, the systems which communicate to the clients data warehouse, eShot providers and fulfillment houses, complete with the VITES databases (containing all the visitor learnings/tracking data) all fully functioning in only a few hours.
Take a look at this simple Deployment Process diagram Sam knocked up to see how it works.

Christmas 2009 shutdown period

Andy — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:33:46 +0000

Connected close the main offices for the Christmas period from midday Thu 24th Dec until Mon 4th Jan. Clients with change contracts are requested to ensure all change requests for this period are sent prior to close of play on Monday 21st.

As usual we have an out of hours support facility on 07590 293 666.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at Connected.

Not happy? Got a problem? Want to complain?

Andy — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:25:21 +0000

We really do try our best to help clients and their customers but, being human, we sometimes fall short of expectations. This is part of being human and we’re keen to hear about your experiences (good as well as bad) so encourage you to contact our CEO, Martin Dower via email martind@connected-uk.com.

So, got a problem, got an issue with how we’ve dealt with you, got a questions about how and why we do stuff. Contact our gaffer, he’ll do his damned best to sort out the problem, whether it’s about support, build, deployment, customer service, consultancy, invoicing / accounts, data protection or a plain old simple complaint about something that is broken.

We do have dedicated teams to deal with different problems and issues, so it’s also worth having a look at the contact section.

You can call him on 0845 051 4228 but in almost every case you’ll get a quicker, more fuller, response using email. Or you can leave a comment on this page and it will be passed onto him.